For Immediate Release
February 9, 2006
McGUINTY GOVERNMENT TO OPEN NEW CAMPUS
FOR MEDICAL TRAINING IN WINDSOR
Part of Plan To Create 104 First Year Spaces, Increase Access to Doctors
WINDSOR – The McGuinty government is expanding opportunities for students and increasing health care access by creating a new campus to teach undergraduate medicine in Windsor, George Smitherman, Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, announced today. The campus will be affiliated with The University of Western Ontario’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.
“The new satellite medical campus in Windsor, together with other satellite campuses in Waterloo Region, St. Catharines, and Mississauga, represent an innovative and effective way to train more doctors in the communities where they live,” Smitherman said. “I'm delighted at the success of this project, and the real winners will be the people in these communities.”
“Ontario must train more doctors, and we’re meeting that need by creating 104 additional first-year medical spaces at Ontario’s medical schools,” Chris Bentley, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities said. “As part of this expansion, medical school education will be offered in Windsor and in three additional communities. This will increase opportunities for students to study closer to home.”
“The selection of Windsor for a new medical school campus is good news for our city and for surrounding communities,” said Dwight Duncan, MPP for Windsor-St. Clair and Ontario’s Finance Minister. “By increasing the number of spots available for medical students we are helping to ensure that people in our community, and in communities across Ontario, have access to the best possible health care.”
"The people of Windsor know that we have been working on this as the next step towards our goal of creating a Windsor base for the next generation of doctors for our area," said Windsor-West MPP Sandra Pupatello. "Today is a great day for Windsor."
Over the next three years, three of the province’s medical schools will open satellite campuses in four communities. The communities and affiliated universities are:
• Kitchener-Waterloo and St. Catharines – McMaster University
• Mississauga – The University of Toronto
• Windsor – The University of Western Ontario.
New spaces for students will also be added at medical schools at Queen’s University in Kingston and at the University of Ottawa.
University of Western Ontario will create a new undergraduate medical campus in Windsor to open in the fall of 2008. The university will add a total of 14 new first-year medical spaces beginning with six in the fall of 2006 and eight the following year. The Windsor campus will open with a class of 24 first-year medical students, which includes 10 existing student spaces to be transferred from London.
The university’s plan builds on the South-Western Ontario Medical Education Network which provides mandatory rural experience for all UWO medical students, as well as rural and regional placements for residents.
The government will provide $297,000 to Western starting in 2006-07 to support the first year of the enrolment increase, growing to almost $2.8 million at full implementation.
In addition, this year the government will provide over $2.8 million in enhanced funding to support the enrolment growth in medical spaces that has occurred at the University of Western Ontario over the past five years. Starting in 2006-07, this funding will grow to almost $4 million to support quality improvements in medical education.
The 104 new first-year medical spaces, combined with the creation of 56 new medical spaces at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine opened in September 2005, will result in a 23 per cent increase in first-year enrolment at Ontario medical schools. Thirty-two of the 104 new first-year spaces were introduced in 2005-06.
“We continue to make great progress in improving the access that Ontarians have to doctors,” Smitherman said. “We're helping to make sure that every Ontario family has access to a doctor, when they need one, close to home.”
“This is a good-news story for London and for Windsor. We are fortunate to be working in partnership with the University of Windsor, Windsor hospitals and community physicians to help make this expansion a reality,” says Paul Davenport, president of the University of Western Ontario. “The four-year campus will build on the success of our clinical medical training already established in partnership with the University of Windsor, through the Southwestern Ontario Medical Education Network. In order to expand our medical program here in London, we need the clinical placements which Windsor will be providing.”
“The doctor shortage in southwestern Ontario is most critical in Windsor and surrounding Essex, Kent and Lambton counties,” said Carol Herbert, dean of Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. “We know that medical students build links in the communities where they do their training and are more likely to practise there after graduation, so we see this as an opportunity to respond directly to the health care needs of the region.”
Herbert also notes this expansion will capitalize on efficiencies in teaching and infrastructure at a time when dollars for health education are in high demand. “Windsor’s willingness to share expertise, resources and provide exceptional clinical teachers means we will be able to guarantee a high-quality medical education at the new Windsor campus, equivalent to the outstanding training well-established in London.”
“We’re working with our medical schools to ensure students are better prepared to meet the future health care needs of Ontarians, where and when they need them,” Bentley said.
“Strengthening our health care professions is a key component of our government's historic Reaching Higher Plan.”
Through Reaching Higher, the McGuinty government is investing $6.2 billion in Ontario's postsecondary system – the single largest, multi-year investment in colleges and universities in 40 years.
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Contacts :
Jen Norman
Minister’s Office
(416) 326-1615
Tanya Blazina
Communications Branch
(416) 325-2746
Public Inquiries:
(416) 325-2929 or 1-800-387-5514
TTY: 1-800-263-2892
